Exit Strategies and Long Goodbyes: Navigating Relational Entanglements When Leaving Classroom Communities

• In Event: Writing (Righting) Ethnographic Exits: Methodological Insights on Leaving the Field from Elementary Literacy Researchers

Abstract

Ethnographic methods require researchers to develop trusting relationships when entering the field, but leaving these sites presents unique challenges. When classroom ethnographers conclude fieldwork, they navigate ambiguous timelines and practices without clear frameworks for closure. Unlike teachers who operate within distinct roles following predictable academic progressions and seasonal transitions, researchers exist in liminal spaces where their position and purpose shift throughout the study.

As a former classroom teacher turned researcher, I have experienced both departures. When students moved to the next grade, despite emotional difficulty saying goodbye, our separation followed institutional logic. Children understood why I stayed while they moved forward, and we could anticipate future hallway encounters within the familiar school structure. Exiting ethnographic projects involves fundamentally different departures. Researchers navigate relationships built on trust and reciprocity, but lack clear pathways that define other professional interactions. We are re/negotiating not just when and how to leave, but what ongoing responsibilities we have to communities that welcomed us. Grounded in relational ethics and epistemic care (Behar, 2022; Guyotte et al., 2021; Noddings, 2015), this paper argues for ethnographic project endings that echo the intentionality, detail, and ethical considerations of our entry approaches.

Exploring endings through multiple ethnographic projects in K-2 classrooms across 10 years, I trace how my ethnographic exits have evolved, consequently shifting my ethnographic approaches. Drawing from fieldwork documentation across four sites, I demonstrate how children's reflections of our presence expose the limitations of our observations and interpretations. Researchers often position their roles as "big kid" (Corsaro, 2003), "unhelpful friend" (Dyson & Genishi, 2005), additional teacher/adult, and collector of stories. Yet, how do children’s perceptions of us differ from how we view ourselves in the research project? Beyond the singular moment of departure, I explore how fieldwork's gradual end can be analyzed through interactions and artifacts that reveal how children understand us. As ethnographic projects close, children often produce material and engage in conversations that make visible how they make sense of the researcher, project intent, and their position within the study. What aspects of researcher identities and relational entanglements (Delamont & Smith, 2023) have children surfaced, and what reverberates in the end? In doing this, I examine what these complex perceptions reveal about the ethics, responsibilities, and obligations of researcher roles while considering how to reciprocate insights born from children's curiosities when departing.

Despite attempts to remain unobtrusive, researchers become participants within classroom communities. Children inevitably write us into the social fabric as fellow travelers, participants, and friends (Figure 3). Exits from research projects are hardly exits from shared experiences—the “good, bad, and data” (Galman, 2013). The person who exits is fundamentally different from the one who entered, shaped by sustained proximity to participants equally affected by the relationship. By analyzing departure-related data, researchers can better understand not only what they take from the field, but what they leave behind. Rather than treating ethnographic exits as foregone conclusions, we might approach them as critical sites for rethinking how to close our projects.

Author

• Haeny S. Yoon, Teachers College, Columbia University